Targeted marketing aims to simultaneously reduce the cost of and improve the response to marketing campaigns by delivering marketing content to recipients who are most likely to be receptive to that content. Cost is reduced by limiting the distribution of the content; response is improved by delivering the content to those recipients most likely to respond.
Common examples of targeted marketing include the following: direct-mail marketing, such as mail order catalog distribution, wherein marketing content is mailed to households whose members belong to a relevant affinity group; newsletter distribution to those individuals who have expressed an explicit interest in receiving the newsletter; advertising inserted into the response pages of online search engines, such as Google™ and Yahoo™ search, wherein the recipients are selected based on the keywords they enter on the search page; and context-based advertisement insertion, such as banner advertisements placed on a website, wherein the website is selected based on knowledge, or implicit assumption, that individuals in a target group are more likely to visit that website than other websites.
Entities that employ targeted marketing face two challenges: 1) cost-effectiveness in identifying the individuals or groups most likely to be differentially more receptive to the marketing content; and 2) identifying the location where the marketing content should be sent to reach those individuals or groups. Responding to those challenges requires the acquisition and processing of information associated with receptiveness and addressability.
The convergence of communications, information, and entertainment services industries has led to the emergence of service providers that provide multiple services, including Internet access, voice services, and video entertainment services among others. Moreover, these service providers are delivering the services over a converged services infrastructure, which, at its core, is based on Internet Protocol (IP) networking technologies. This extensive services infrastructure consists of systems, information and processes needed to deliver a wide range of information, entertainment and communications services to millions of users. This infrastructure also represents a potentially valuable set of resources on which to build and operate a wide range of powerful marketing services.